


All of Yesterday's Tomorrows

by Tamoline



Category: Continuum (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-23
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 13:18:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2349782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tamoline/pseuds/Tamoline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It becomes a time war, sometimes flickering hot, sometimes running cold. Kiera survives and survives and occasionally lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All of Yesterday's Tomorrows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miri Cleo (miri_cleo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miri_cleo/gifts).



There’s something familiar in the air, a sort of crackling static electricity playing over her skin. Kiera4758 - or Kiera as she still likes to call herself in the privacy of her own head, no matter how confusing that can get - turns to look at her partner, Kiera9235, to see her looking back with exactly the same expression. Neither of them are surprised when an Alex’s voice comes over the comms.

“Temporal invalidation event.” Alex speak for someone just jumped into the past and changed it enough that the timeline was falling apart. “Lifeboat situation.” Get the hell out of here if you could. “Last stable point: 6 days ago at 10 am.” Protocol learned the hard way in the early days of the war. Everyone always has to jump for the last stable point, otherwise the people who jumped to an earlier point could invalidate those who jumped to a later one.

Kiera is an old enough split that she can remember a time when that protocol wasn’t in place, can remember a time when she and another Kiera both ran for time capsules. She arrived back when it was safe. She never knew if the other Kiera did, or if she was a temporal split that ended there. 

Something about her partner looks even older. Maybe even years older. Kiera can’t help wondering how much *she’s* seen, whether she sometimes feels like she has as little in common with Kiera as Kiera sometimes does to splits closer to the (always the same, constantly changing) Kiera Prime, the Kiera who’s always going through all this for the first time. But she’s old enough, experienced enough, that she hasn’t asked, hasn’t prodded at the differences, the temporal scar tissue that separates her from her partner. Apparently they’ve both grown up that much.

“Where’s the nearest lifeboat?” she asks the Alex.

It takes almost a minute for him to answer, doubtless due to everyone else asking the same damn question. “The nearest one,” the nearest one that hasn’t already been claimed, “is taped to the underside of a cover to a manhole, a little over ten miles away.” Too far. Even now, Kiera can feel this timeline start to crumble, and none of the other caches she knows about are any closer. “I can give you the coordinates if you want,” he adds without any conviction in his voice.

Time travel devices - and temporal duplicate upon temporal duplicate - have proliferated like mushrooms on dung during this war, but it seems her luck has finally run out.

This time, it’s her who’s going to die.

“I know where a closer one is,” her partner says quietly, almost tiredly, and Kiera feels her heart trip and begin to race. Because, no matter how long she’s been doing this, she hasn’t yet learned to give up, to not do everything in her power to survive to fight another day.

A car comes screeching to a halt as she steps out into the street, aiming a gun at the windscreen. The driver - a middle-aged woman, dressed up like she’s on her way to a date - babbles ‘Please don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!’ as her partner manhandles her out of the driver’s seat, and Kiera can’t even bring herself to care. The woman’s dead already. She’d probably never have reached wherever she was going anyway, as the world crumbled around her.

She gets pushed back into her seat as her partner accelerates as hard as she can, somehow managing to avoid the other cars in the street, to the tune of horns and faint shouted voices. She can’t help but wonder when and under what circumstances her partner managed to acquire this much skill with this period’s vehicles. Certainly she’d be hesitant about trying some of the things her partner pulls off almost effortlessly. Wonders how many years it’s been since they diverged, her going one way, her partner another.

Maybe she’ll ask for some training, if they both get out of this alive.

At one point, she might have spent the journey trying not to think about what her son and her husband’s last moments might have been like - might have spent sleepless nights crying about it, back when this was new - but she’s been through this scenario too many times already. She’s far enough gone that the only ache she has left is that it doesn’t hurt anymore. Now all that matters is getting to the lifeboat in time.

Her partner brings the car to a screeching halt, just outside a boarded up shop. There isn’t time for finesse, so she scrambles out as soon as the car stops, and breaks the door down. Her partner moves past her and retrieves a cardboard box from beneath the counter. She hands Kiera a familiar-looking device from within. It’s not the sphere, though, and it takes a moment for her to realise where she’s seen it before - a future faction used them, from… iterations ago, months or years in Kiera’s personal timeline. She’s not sure now if they were trying to change things or maintain their existence, if she ever knew in the first place. 

It all looks the same from the sharp end.

She isn’t exactly surprised to see variant tech - you use anything you can in a lifeboat situation, and the point of homogeneity has long since been lost - but to see something that has survived from so long ago… She can’t help giving her partner a quizzical look.

“Do you know how to use that?” she’s asked.

She shrugs. “Sure,” and starts setting coordinates after connecting the power source as her partner goes around the shop, retrieving more boxes after checking the contents. Probably more stored future tech - it’s only good practise, given the numbers of Kieras that seem to only increase with every iteration. Not to mention the members of Liber8, the Alexs and the other people they’ve managed to accumulate.

The sound of gunfire comes from behind her, and she’s ducked on the ground behind a shelf before she can even think. It’s only when she tries to rise to her feet, and the world spins and darkens around her that she realises something is wrong. A hand to her neck comes away bloody. 

At least the bleeding doesn’t seem to be arterial, she thinks muzzily, before she slumps to the floor.

More gunfire, and, in the dim circle of light that’s all that’s left of her vision, she sees her face, floating, looking concerned.

“Stay here,” it whispers. “I’ll hold them off until we can get out of here.”

Kiera just concentrates on remaining conscious and holding as much blood in as she can whilst the gunfire continues, until there’s a pulse of white light and she’s falling endlessly.

When she can see again, she knows that she’s back in the past, without even having to concentrate. “Synchronise,” she manages to croak.

Synchronised, the suit tells her. You are now Kiera1876.

Of course she is. Because Kiera4758 and her partner Kiera9235 - or at least the versions of themselves that were here one week ago - are still walking around.

At one point, near the beginning of the war, they’d numbered each successive time-jumper incrementally. Kiera1, Kiera2 and so on and so forth, just so everyone would know who they were talking about, as well as a way of differentiating between suit comms. She still remembered the incident that had changed that, remembered jumping back and being assigned Kiera8, starting to protest that Kiera8 had already been assigned, when it had struck her. Kiera8 had jumped to a time ahead of this point. Kiera8 now would never exist, had never existed.

And Kiera had just been joking with her, laughing with her, the day before.

Kiera remembered emptying her stomach on the floor at the realisation. In retrospect, she’d been so naive back then.

Alex had then programmed a semi-random number generator into the system, to stop something like that happening again. He’d said…

“Come in, Kiera1876. Are you able to respond?”

With a shock, she realises that she’d allowed herself to drift almost to the point of unconsciousness, laying in a spreading pool of her own blood.

“Yes,” she whispers raspily, clamping down harder on the wound in her neck. “Just about.”

“What’s your status?”

“Lifeboat.” Not intel. Just another soldier for the fight. “Need medical assistance.”

There’s a pause, and she can’t help wondering if she’s managed to materialise in the middle of a situation, if they’re just going to leave her here because they don’t have the resources to look after her. She doesn’t remember anything like that happening, but she’s also aware that the situation has likely changed from what she recalls.

Another yesterday. Another tomorrow.

Finally the Alex replies. “We’ll have someone with you shortly,” he says before signing off.

The already dim shop greys around her, and she tries to concentrate on breathing in, breathing out and holding onto her neck with everything she’s got. 

Nothing else matters. 

Nothing else exists.

Only this. Only this.

So she startles when there’s suddenly movement in what remains of her field of vision. She might think that she’s seeing triple, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re all Garza. Out of all of them, she’s got the most tolerance for working with her temporal splits.

“At least I get to work with some people I can trust,” she’d said more than once, a smirk on her face.

Their mouths are moving, but Kiera can’t quite manage to interpret the babble that’s coming out of them. Her hand is removed from her neck, despite her best efforts, more pressure is applied and then she’s finally, finally moving. Finally.

The shop bounces around her, then daylight and then she’s in a car, being held down by a Garza. She hazes out for a bit and then she’s being carried into a building of some kind before being laid onto some kind of flat surface, maybe a table. A Sonya’s face fills her vision, her lips moving, then the prick of a needle and all of a sudden the fog rolls away and she can think a lot more clearly.

“You’re lucky that you had those supplies with you,” she’s saying as she connects Kiera via a drip to a bag of something her chip identifies as synthesised blood.

“Lucky,” she says. “Yes.” If there’s one thing she’s learned as this war has gone on - and the number of people on their side has increased, due to time jump after time jump, it’s that supplies, whether time-jumped backwards or seized from any of the ever-changing opposition factions, have only become more important.

The Sonya is giving her a look, as if she still can’t quite believe she’s here, patching Kiera up, instead of trying to neutralise her. It’s a look Kiera’s familiar with - it’s a look that Sonyas near the Prime often have. Sonyas who haven’t had time, yet, to let the old grievances go. If they survive, they learn. There’re so many more things to worry about these days, after all.

The look is completely normal, completely natural. It still makes something in Kiera knot up, but she buries it under as pleasant a smile as she can manage. No harm in not trying to do her part to ease relations, after all. The Sonya narrows her eyes in suspicion, anyway, until her gaze falls on the exposed skin of Kiera’s left wrist, and her expression goes blank. With surprise, and maybe a little something else.

“You’ve got a tattoo,” she says.

Kiera shrugs, but doesn’t say anything.

“You don’t… You’re the first Kiera I’ve seen with a tattoo.”

The same thing rises in Kiera again, and this time she suppresses it with a smirk. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that splits get stranger the further they go out?” It’s something she’s heard before, something she’s even thought at a few particularly egregious examples.

“But…” the Sonya says, and for a minute Kiera thinks that she’s actually going to ask the question that’s so obviously on the tip of her tongue, but then she closes her mouth again, pressing her lips together firmly. When she opens them again, she’s looking at anywhere except Kiera’s wrist. “There’s nothing wrong with you now that a bit of rest won’t take care of,” she says, then disappears out of the room.

It’s stupid to be disappointed, and so Kiera isn’t. She gets carefully to her feet, and walks to the common area. A Travis is there, chest bandaged, feet propped up on a footstool, watching what looks like a rom-com of some kind. He looks up, and gives her a half-grin. “Hey, cockroach,” he says, a tentative look in his eyes like he’s not quite sure what response he’s going to get back.

Kiera can’t help grinning back. She hasn’t heard that in *so* long. A Travis had radioed out for backup, and, after cleanup, after it’d become clear that *five* Kieras had turned up, he’d looked around in disgust and said, “You enforcers really are worse than goddamn cockroaches, aren’t you?”

It’d instantly become something of an in-joke. But she hadn’t heard it in so long that, well.

She hadn’t heard it in a while.

“Hey,” she says and for a moment his smile is broad and bright and something she’s never really seen off him, before it dims again and he looks away and she realises with a lurch that he was expecting something else from her. Maybe she was supposed to say something different or do something else or…

It doesn’t really matter. It hadn’t been her he’d been looking for, and *god* she knows how that feels.

“Good luck,” she murmurs as she leaves the place, and goes to find somewhere to get some rest. She knows all the current safe houses. It shouldn’t be that hard.

On the way, she inquisits her suit about her partner, without much hope. She doesn’t remember hearing anything after the time jump, but maybe… Maybe. But the search comes back null. No Keira9235 lifeboated from the future. She’s still out there, of course, missing a week and all the experiences they shared. But it’s not the same, and Kiera is old enough and tired enough to know that much.

Hopefully her younger split will have more luck.

She manages to find a safe house with an empty crib - a safe house her younger split will hopefully not be returning to tonight - flop down and try to recover as best she can before the next emergency. There are some Kieras already there, and they look so young and certain they have to be only a few hops away from being Prime. They greet her when they see her, and immediately start trying to compare timelines.

“How old are you?” one of them asks.

“Old enough to realise how pointless a question that is,” she replies before bunking down and shutting her eyes. She can’t help wondering what it’s like - having been Prime when there are so many splits around, being forced to adapt to the idea of there being so many versions of yourself with different histories even before having to make that first jump into this jumbled continuity. Back when she’d been Prime, back before the Prime designation had even been invented, there had only been two other Kieras - well, three, but one had died even before she’d known her - and things had seemed comparatively sane by comparison.

Of course, at the *time* she’d wondered if she was going to go mad wrapping her head around it, but she’d known nothing back then.

Finally, she manages to block out the chatter, relax and fall asleep to dream of matryoshka dolls.

It’s a couple of days later when she gets a call. “Kiera1876, make best speed for the equipment dump on Blenheim, get a temporal shield tether, then get to the corner of 11th and Trimble and prepare to activate.”

Kiera swears internally and presses on the accelerator. Temporal shields are only used if something very bad is coming down from the future, and they absolutely need to stop it before it does. Usually, this means that a survivor from whatever it was managed to make it back and warn them. Kiera’s been there and done that, and it’s never easy. And with a temporal shield going up, she just hopes that any of them still in the future knows enough to avoid it once it does.

She grabs the tether - salvaged from a future long since lost, retro-engineered by Alexes, Lucases and Sonyas all working together and a disturbing mix of metal and organic - and shoves it into a backpack. She really doesn’t need any questions about what it is today, and runs back out to the car. It’s stolen - they just don’t have enough money to equip everyone legally - but she’s not worried about the police. They’re working on linear time, and Kiera’s group left them behind ago months and years ago.

She parks as close as she can, tells the Alex on the other end, “Two minutes away from position. Let me know when to advance,” and waits. She can’t help wondering what’s incoming. Maybe it’s not intelligent - a bomb or a virus or a genetically engineered monstrosity. Maybe it is, though. Maybe it’s some soldiers travelling from a transitory future who left their homes on some kind of mission and…

And are simply not going to arrive, because the situation they caused was (will be) that bad.

There had been a time when she’d have wanted to know more, maybe have needed to know more, but things have advanced far too much in complexity since then and she holds too many histories that never were in her head to keep track of everything that’s happening now. She just has to trust that KieraPrime can do a better job than she can.

“Go,” the Alex says, and she gets out of the car and walks towards the corner. Once she reaches it, she takes out her phone, and examine it, as if looking at a text message.

“Activate,” the Alex says, and she does.

Soon the alerts come across the suit. Lifeboat, lifeboat, lifeboat, and something in her relaxes. At least some people got out of whatever future they’d just stopped.

“Pickup on 6th and Sasamat,” comes over the comms and Kiera raises her eyebrows a little. *Someone* had been cutting it close.

“On it,” Kiera replies and gets back in her car.

There’s a Sonya huddled against a wall in a side-alley. Kiera brings the car to a stop next to the curb, and gets out.

“Pickup,” she says, and the Sonya jerks her head up to look at her. There’s something different about the cast to her face to most of the Sonyas she’s seen, something more open and at the same time more beaten down. For a moment, there’s something like hope in the Sonya’s eyes, before her eyes flicker down to Kiera’s right wrist and it dies again. It’s something… not exactly familiar, but close enough that Kiera decides to take a risk and leap.

“Not that wrist for me,” she says. “The other one.” She turns her wrist so the Sonya can see the tattoo clearly.

From the look on the Sonya’s face, she’s hit the mark. Or at least close enough. “Cassiopeia,” she says, and the brush of her fingers makes Kiera ache in a way she hasn’t allowed herself to feel in so, so long.

“Your favourite constellation,” she says as emotionlessly as she can.

“Can you find out if Kiera2295 made it back?” the Sonya asks.

Kiera asks her suit. “Sorry,” she says. “Not yet.” Not unless her Kiera’s suit has been disabled to the point where it can’t emit a signal. It probably means never, but she doesn’t want to say that out loud.

The Sonya is silent until they’re both seated, and Kiera is pulling the car away from the curb.

“How did you…” she gestures at the tattoo. “You know.”

“We were making one of those pushes to hold on for as long as possible, to try and get as far into the future as we could. We’d actually gotten to…” she tries to remember, “July 2015.” Or it might have been 2016. It had been so long ago. “We’d started thinking that we were past the worst of it, before three different future factions decided to stick their oars in all at once. Sonya and I ended up stuck on a building top for three days, with only foiling occasional attacks on a laboratory across the way to distract us,” she finds herself smiling at the memory. “Apparently not distracting us *enough*,” she corrects. “And, well…” she shrugs.

It’d just started as something light. Something to distract themselves from the pair of temporal split induced breakups they’d both recently gone through. But it hadn’t ended that way, though Kiera had refused to admit it even to herself until she’d found herself agreeing to have Sonya tattoo her favourite constellation on her wrist. “Just so I know it’s you,” she said with a smile and a kiss.

She tried not to think of how it had ended, when the war had briefly flickered magnesium hot. Tried to not to remember the mushroom cloud over the city as someone from the future had decided to try and stop the time war *their* way.

She’d survived by being outside of Vancouver at the time, had gone back to stop it happening, had lost Sonya. She’d still been out there - a younger version, anyway - but she’d already had her own Kiera, and what could she really do anyway?

It’d hurt, but there’d been some comfort in knowing that they as a couple existed somewhere.

And then the tide turned against them and the rollbacks continued. Pushed further and further back, by both enemy action and their own, necessary, responses, until their relationship had never existed in the first place. Not in this timeline.

She didn’t see many Kiera’s from that timeline anymore, marked by the Cassiopeia tattoo on their left wrist. And there were never many Sonyas, period. Something inside her unclenches at the thought that maybe they weren’t an aberration, that they could happen again, from fresh beginnings.

She doesn’t say any of this, though. This Sonya doesn’t need to hear anything about endings, certainly not at the moment. Instead she says, “Good luck with finding her,” and they spend the rest of the trip in peace. The Sonya asks for her number as she gets out. “Just in case,” she says, with a painful smile.

It’s a week later when she gets a priority call about a possible incursion, and the Sonya - the Kiera split’s Sonya - is a pickup on route. She hands Kiera a mask after she gets in. “Suspected biological attack,” she says shortly, and Kiera nods and drives off.

The silence this time feels awkward. The Sonya hasn’t offered any details about the attack, so Kiera has to assume that there aren’t many at the moment. And she doesn’t quite know how to approach the subject of her split. Normally she wouldn’t, but this… this approaches something that’s apparently still more raw with Kiera than she’d realised.

She wants to do *something*. She just isn’t sure what.

It’s hours later and the Sonya is bent over slides, running them through some kind of test whilst Kiera slouches against a bench, staring at stain on the ceiling that even her chip is having problems analysing, when the talk finally turns to something not work-related.

“She didn’t make it,” the Sonya says whilst peering at a slide through a microscope.

Kiera blinks, cancelling analysis nine of a particularly stubborn yellowish-green mark. “Sorry?”

“My Kiera. She didn’t make it through.”

“I’m sorry,” Kiera says, almost by rote. She’s seen more people lose lovers - and lost more herself - than she can count. But it’s still painful every time and it’s only worse when this is new to you. “Take you out for a drink, afterwards?”

The Sonya pauses for a moment, then looks up, and her eyes are wet and thankful, but, “Afterwards,” is all she says.

It’s weeks later and they’re still somehow the main timeline, with only occasional intel and lifeboat situations from the future, when it finally happens. They’ve both had too much to drink after a case gone right, absolutely-fucking-right, for once, and Sonya’s been getting steadily closer all evening. And she’s Sonya, not the Sonya, which is always a warning sign to the part of Kiera’s mind that is sane and sensible, and thankfully shutting up as Sonya kisses her artlessly outside the bar.

It feels like forever since she’s done this and like she never stopped, all at once.

Afterwards, after they’ve found a room, a bed, after they’ve had sex and after Kiera’s done her best to ignore the tears that she doesn’t feel that she has the right to do anything about, she’s gently drifting off to sleep when she feels Sonya stroking her stomach gently.

“You don’t just have one tattoo,” she says softly.

Kiera smiles, a little crookedly and a little sadly. “I haven’t just been with one woman who likes to mark me.”

Sonya’s eyes are bright with reflected light from the street. “Tell me about them.”

So she does. She talks about Sonya, who tattooed what she swore was part of Kiera’s DNA onto her arm, though she refused to tell her which sequence in particular, or what it did. She talks about Sonya, who, in a display of macabre humour, tattooed an injury that Kiera had almost died from, that Sonya’d treated, that they’d gotten to know each other over. She talks about Sonya, who’d tattooed a temporal map of their meetings, all string and lines and whorls, and more talk of theory than Kiera had done before or since.

She talks about Sonya. And, with some gentle encouragement, she talks about endings, and sheds some tears of her own.

“I’m not them,” Sonya says into the darkness, after the flow of words has ceased.

“That’s alright,” Kiera says. “I’m not her either.”

“And you are, at the same time.”

“And I am, at the same time,” Kiera echoes. 

We come from the same root, she thinks, even if we can flower so very differently.

It’s a week later, and Kiera is laying front down on a table. Behind her, she can hear the buzzing of the tattoo machine. Sonya has yet to tell her what the design is going to be, but the fact that the world has yet to tear itself apart is enough for now.

Sonya presses a kiss to the back of her neck just before the needle starts to bite.

“Something to remember me by,” she whispers. Something to carry with her through tomorrow and tomorrow and all of yesterday’s tomorrows.


End file.
